Slow Heat in Heaven (24 page)

"I'm not!"

"Aren't you?"

"No. And I don't need you to tell me how bad I look." She drew herself up. "I'll have Ken deliver the payroll checks on Friday. So while you're busting your balls for the company, rest assured that you'll be well paid for your efforts."

She left him cursing amid the artificial forest.

Dr. Collins sought her out the next afternoon at a little past two o'clock. She was in the waiting room, resting her head against the wall. He sat down beside her and took her hand. She braced herself to hear the worst.

"I don't want to be too optimistic," he began, "but he's showing marked signs of improvement."

Her breath escaped in a gust of profound relief. "Thank God."

The doctor squeezed her hand. "I want to keep him in an ICU for another week at least. But I think he's past the critical stage."

"Can I see him?"

"Yes."

"When?"

"In five minutes. During which I suggest you brush your hair and put on some lipstick. We don't want to scare the poor man to death after all he's been through." She laughed shakily.

Five minutes later she entered the ICU where Cotton had previously resided. She noticed his improved color immediately. His skin had lost its grayish pallor. The attending nurse withdrew respectfully, allowing Schyler a modicum of privacy with her father.

She bent over him and touched his hair. His eyes opened and found her. "You're going to be fine," she whispered. Her fingertip smoothed over one of his shaggy white eyebrows, which disobediently sprang back up. "When you get better, I'll explain everything." She licked her lips to moisten them, even though she had just applied lipstick. "But I want you to know something, and it's the truth." She paused to make certain that he was lucid and that she had his full attention. "I've never been pregnant. I've never had an abortion. I would never have killed your grandbaby." She laid her hand along his cheek. "Daddy, do you hear me?"

His eyes clouded with tears. She had her answer.

"I've never lied to you in my life. You know that. What I'm telling you is the truth. I swear it on Belle Terre, which you know I dearly love. I've never been pregnant. It was all
a . . .
an unfortunate misunderstanding."

The change that came over his face was as dramatic as the first dawn of light breaking out of darkness. His features fell into restful, peaceful repose. His eyes closed. A tear eked from between the wrinkled lids. Schyler wiped it away with her thumb, then bent down and lovingly kissed his forehead.

Exhausted as she was, she left the hospital feeling better than she had in six years.

The first thing Schyler did when she returned to Belle Terre was take a scalding and soapy shower. She ruthlessly massaged her itchy scalp with shampoo, shaved her legs, and got to feeling human again.

Then she went directly to bed and slept for sixteen hours.

When she woke up the following morning, she was ravenous. She dressed in a casual skirt and top, then went downstairs to the kitchen. The three-egg, ham and cheese omelet was almost ready when Mrs. Graves came in.

"Good morning," Schyler said pleasantly as she deftly slid the omelet out of the pan and onto the plate. The housekeeper, incensed that her kitchen had been invaded, made no reply but turned on her heels and stalked out. Amused, Schyler sat down at the kitchen table and consumed every speck of food on her plate, washing it down with orange juice she had squeezed fresh and two cups of coffee.

It was raining, she noted as she cleaned up after her breakfast. The sky was dark with low, scuttling clouds. A good day to sleep late. And apparently that's what Tricia and Ken were doing.

She left the house without seeing them and drove to the hospital. At the door of Cotton's ICU, she came to an abrupt standstill. Using a slender nurse as his crutch, he was standing beside his bed. He raised his head and smiled at his daughter.

"Hurts like bloody hell but feels great."

Dropping her purse on the floor, Schyler rushed forward and hugged him for the first time since Tricia had married Ken.

They were spared a highly emotional scene by the nurse saying, "I hope you have better control over him than I do, Ms. Crandall. He's the most cantankerous, profane patient I've ever had."

"That's a goddam lie."

The women winked at each other behind Cotton's back. Together they eased him back into bed. For all his bravado, the exercise had exhausted him. Almost as soon as his head touched the pillow, he began snoring gently. Schyler watched him sleep for a while, then left his room and went to the lobby gift shop to order flowers for him. They had a lot of sorting out to do. But there would be time for that later. Thank God, there would be time.

She waited around for several hours, but he didn't wake up. Dr. Collins and the cardiac surgeon assured her that the best thing for him now was sleep. She left without speaking to Cotton again, but the fond smile he'd given her when she entered his room had been her reassurance that he remembered what she had told him the day before and that his faith in her had been restored.

She was anxious to attend to business at the landing, but it would keep for another few hours. There was something she must do first. It had been put off long enough. Six years in fact.

It was shortly after noon when she returned to Belle Terre from the hospital. The weather was still inclement. She ran from her car to the veranda through a hard rain. The rooms of the lower story were empty. She heard Mrs.

Graves moving about the kitchen but avoided her. She went upstairs. A radio was playing behind Tricia's bedroom door. Schyler opened the door without knocking and stepped inside.

Tricia, wearing a satin kimono over her slip, was sitting at a vanity table applying makeup. She was humming along with Rod Stewart. When Schyler appeared in her mirror, Tricia dropped the eye crayon and spun around on the tufted velvet cushion of the stool.

"I didn't hear you knock."

"I didn't knock."

Tricia's hand moved to the lapels of her robe and pulled them together, a giveaway of her nervousness, though none of it showed up on her face. "How rude. Has associating with white trash made you forget common courtesy?"

Schyler refused to be provoked or put on the defensive. She went to the radio and switched it off with an angry flick of her wrist. The silence was abrupt and absolute. Schyler confronted her sister.

"You don't deserve my courtesy. Be glad you won't get what you deserve." Schyler was angry, angry enough to cross the room and tear out Tricia's glossy hair strand by strand. But overriding her anger was perplexity. "Why, Tricia? What possible motive could you have had for telling Cotton that I had aborted a baby?"

"What makes you think I did?"

"No more games," Schyler lashed out. "I know. What I don't know is
why.
For god sake, why would you make up such a lie?"

Tricia rose to her feet and gave the belt of her kimono a vicious yank. She went to the window, moved aside the drapes and gazed out at the dreary day. The drape dropped back into place when she let it go. Finally she faced Schyler.

"To get him off my back, that's why. So he would stop condemning me for snatching Ken away from you. Not that I had to do much snatching." She raised her chin haughtily. Her hair swung against her shoulders. "Once he had been to bed with me, there was no question of him ever going back to you."

A statement like that would have destroyed Schyler several years ago, but now her mind concentrated on something else. "Cotton berated you for taking Ken away from me?"

Tricia laughed shortly and without humor. "Berated. Badgered. Bitched. Call it whatever you want. For the way he carried on, you would think I'd driven a stake through your heart. He went on and on about how I had betrayed you, how I had deliberately set out to get Ken only because you wanted him."

Schyler ran her fingers over the carved rosewood back of a chaise longue. She could remember Macy reclining on its linen cushions, distracted and distant, when her daughters came to kiss her good night. Schyler could still feel her mother's cool lips barely grazing her cheek. Tricia had always pushed Schyler aside, clambering to claim those dispassionate kisses that were so miserly dispensed.

"And wasn't he right?" she asked her sister softly. "Didn't you want Ken only because I had him?"

"No!" Tricia answered shrilly. "I fell in love with Ken. You're just like Daddy, always ready to think the worst of me."

"You give people no choice but to think that, Tricia. You've schemed all your life. But
this . . . this . . ."
Her eyes searched the beautiful room, looking for words suitably descriptive of Tricia's betrayal. She came up empty. "How could you do something so mean?"

"I didn't do it to hurt you, Schyler."

Schyler gaped at her incredulously. "How could it not?"

"Because you're a survivor. You moved to London and started a new life. I thought Daddy would get over it."

"Over his daughter having an abortion?"

"Oh, for heaven's sake! I just said the first thing that popped into my head when he asked me how I could do such a thing to poor little Schyler." Mockingly, she laid a hand against her breast.

"I don't believe you. I think you told him that because you knew it would drive a permanent wedge between us."

"That's bull." Tricia returned to the dressing table and picked up the eye crayon again. Leaning toward the mirror and pulling down her lower lid, she applied color to it. "Don't make such a federal case out of it. An abortion just seemed like a believable reason for you and Ken to have quarreled. I didn't know Daddy was going to mope about it forever."

"When it became apparent that he was, that he was holding it against me, why didn't you tell him the truth?"

"Because I didn't want him to hate me."

"But you let him hate
me."

Tricia whirled around. "Well it was about time those tables were turned, wasn't it?"

Schyler fell back a step, astonished by Tricia's obvious hatred. Her face was taut with it. "What do you mean?"

"Wasn't it my time to have his approval? To have his attention? To have his love?" Her shapely chest rose and fell beneath the satin. The words had been pent up inside her for years. Now they poured out. "He doted on you. Everything you did was right, perfect. When he happened to see past you and look at me, he didn't like what he saw."

"Tricia, that's not true."

Tricia ignored her. "When he spoke to me, it was always to criticize. But you, you could do no wrong."

She flung off her robe and went to her closet. She jerked a dress off its hanger and stepped into it. Schyler noticed what a beautiful woman Tricia was. Her body was well made. Her figure was slender and compact. Her face would have been beautiful, too, were it not for the bitterness that prevented it from being femininely soft.

Tricia went back to the dressing table and picked up a lipstick. She twirled it out of the gold tube and applied it in smooth rapid strokes to her lower lip. "I don't know why the hell they got me." She rubbed her lips together and dropped the tube of lipstick back onto the dressing table with a clatter.

"They wanted you."

Tricia made a scornful sound. "Your naïveté confounds me, Schyler. Mama was half loony because she couldn't have a baby of her own."

"She wanted to give Daddy children."

Tricia groaned in derision. Wrapping a belt around her waist, she latched and adjusted it. "She didn't give a damn about giving Daddy anything but a hard time. She wanted to have a baby because that would guarantee a Laurent heir to Belle Terre. At least half a Laurent, which was the best she could do. Being unable to have a child made her less than perfect. She couldn't accept that about herself. So she went a little nuts when she couldn't conceive."

"Don't say that. Mama wasn't a very happy woman, but—"

"Dammit, Schyler, she was miserable.
Yes!"
she stressed when she saw that Schyler was about to contradict her. "She was a miserable, self-centered bitch. Her main occupation in life was to make everybody else miserable, too. She didn't love us. She loved herself. Period. Cotton loved you. You worshiped the ground he walked on. So where do you think that left me? Huh? Out in the cold. Every single day of my life. And when Ken Howell came along with his pedigree in one hand and his broken heart in the other, you're damn right I wanted him. Why shouldn't I? It was my turn," she screamed, flattening a hand against her chest. "You bet I went after him. I would have done anything to keep you from having him."

"Anything?
There was never a baby, was there, Tricia? You never were pregnant. That was a lie, too. There was no miscarriage after the wedding, was there?"

"What difference—"

"Tell me!

"No!"

Their animosity was palpable. Tricia's one-word confirmation of Schyler's long-held suspicion served as a bell ending a round, signaling each to return to her corner. They caught their breath. Schyler was the first to speak.

"Does Ken know you deceived him?"

Tricia shrugged as she lit a cigarette. "I imagine so. He's no Einstein, but he's not that stupid. We've never talked about it." She blew out a cloud of smoke, aimed ceiling- ward. "I think he prefers to believe that a heavy period was a miscarriage. I say let him, if that makes him feel better about losing you."

She gave Schyler a once-over. "Actually between the two of us, I'm a much better wife to him than you ever would have been. Your self-sufficiency threatens him. He admires it, but he doesn't like it. It makes his shortcomings too apparent."

"Don't you dare tell me what kind of wife I would have made Ken. I loved him. Deeply."

Tricia's mouth turned up at the corners. "Yes," she said softly, "I know."

"He came back to me. You couldn't stand that." Schyler's words struck home. Tricia angrily flicked an ash into a Waterford ashtray on the vanity. "That's why you made up the lie about being pregnant. You wanted to hurt us both. You saw a way to emotionally destroy me and to trap Ken."

As Schyler sifted through her thoughts, she moved to the windows. The rainfall was heavier than before. Puddles were forming in the grass on the lawn. Even in the rain, Belle Terre was beautiful. Nothing diminished its beauty in her eyes.

"But then you had to justify yourself to Daddy. You knew that what he valued above everything was Belle Terre. He talked constantly about establishing a dynasty. Even though they wouldn't bear his name, he wanted generations of children to grow up in this house. You knew he wanted that more than anything. You knew the thing that would hurt him the most was to find out that one of us had aborted his grandchild."

"Oh, Jesus," Tricia swore as she ground out her cigarette. "You're as sentimental as he is. Our children wouldn't be his grandchildren. Because we're not his! All that dynasty and generational talk was ridiculous. It was embarrassing to hear him carry on about it like a babbling fool. He doesn't belong to Belle Terre any more than we do. Everybody in the parish knows that he only married Macy Laurent to get Belle Terre."

"That's not true. He loved Mama."

"And he screwed Monique Boudreaux!"

Schyler spun around and looked at Tricia with patent disbelief.

Tricia burst out laughing. "Gracious sakes alive. You didn't know, did you? I can't believe it," she said, flabbergasted. "You honestly didn't know that she was Cotton's mistress? Amazing." Shaking her head, she made a scornful sound. "What do you think he is, a monk? Saint Cotton? Did you think he went without a place to stick it all those years he and mama didn't sleep together?"